A comedy of Welsh war crimes

The last three novels in the Louie Knight detective series were called Aberystwyth Mon Amour, Last Tango in Aberystwyth and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth, so no prizes for guessing where this latest one is set. For Louie, the down-at-heel gumshoe who relies on his enthusiastic assistant Calamity to get him through the long, grey days, never needs to travel far to find unsolved cases of murder, espionage, kidnap, and now, war crimes.

Like many a hometown, Aberystwyth is horrible to Louie but full of people he loves. There's Myfanwy, Calamity, Dad and Sospan the philosophising ice-cream seller. And in December 1989, when this book opens, the old place is redolent with festive charm: 'Aberystwyth at Christmas. The smell of pine drifts along the Prom, mingling with the reek of bladder wrack, toffee apple, vanilla and wet donkey fur... From somewhere beyond the spires of the old college children sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem"... The ice man shivers behind his empty counter and in a filthy alley in Chinatown a man in a red-and-white coat with a long white beard lies dead in a pool of his own gore.'

So who killed Santa? Was it the military arm of the Church of Our Lady of the Paper Bag, the Soldiers for Jesus? Or the ghoulish Moth brothers? And is the Queen of Denmark really who she says she is?

But it is with the arrival of the 'Old Jew', a sad and desperate figure who claims the dead Santa was his brother Absalom, that things get kind of weird. He speaks of a coat stolen in Patagonia, which concealed a list of all the people who attended Eichmann's weekly card game. Every Nazi fugitive in Patagonia would be on it, so the agencies prepared to kill for it are numerous: Israel, America, Russia and, of course, Hoffmann of the Welsh Intelligence.

Add into the mix a canine war hero and Myfanwy's crazed love rival, and you have another wonderfully silly fantasy which stops short of complete delight only because, firstly, comic novels about escaped Nazis and wandering Jews can be rather hard to enjoy, and secondly, we expect sharper social commentary from Pryce than observing that 'the guy who checks your ticket on the train is now a Train Manager', or informing us that when the soldiers laid down their arms and played football in the First World War, there was 'no better cameo in all the annals of history for demonstrating the futile insanity or war'.

But there are many moments when the old magic is alive and well, and throughout Don't Cry For Me... Louie is as perfectly written an example of the embittered private eye who never made it out of his home town as you'll ever read. And he's more prone to self-analysis than ever, both Proustian - when he finds himself terribly moved by the sight of a bursting conker - and Freudian, when he takes for himself a maxim we would all do well to remember: 'Welcome to life. First thing you learn, milk isn't free.'